The rapidly accumulating genetic information combined with combinatorial chemistry and bioinformatics allowing the handling of enormous amounts of information has created a demand for new more accurate methods, which allow the simultaneous and/or sequential studies of dynamic situations and variations in natural environments. Accordingly, totally new approaches for carrying out research in molecular biology, health care, epidemiology, pharmaceutical and food industry are required.
In health care as well as in pharmaceutical and food industry, especially, practicing physicians, environmental consults, industrial hygienists, safety officers, health inspectors, environmental consults, veterinarians and/or other persons working with or being responsible for the evaluations of possible health or epidemiologic risks have a need for new effective tools for assessing the effects of remedial, sanitary or other measures on whole populations of organisms. There is for example an increasing demand for methods and tools for assessing the effects of new and conventional treatment modalities, including sanitary and remedial measures.
Based on the accumulating information including availability of genetical key elements and the knowledge of their biological role and functions, new methods are continuously developed. A powerful new tool is the oligomer-chip technology. The common characteristic of the microarray techniques and the feature distinguishing it from the present invention is that the probes or the polynucleotide sequences used as reagents are immobilized or coupled to a solid carrier. The immobilization of the probes acts as a steric hindrance and prevents the hybridization to take place in a stochiometric fashion, thus, resulting in a low yield. The oligomer-chip technology allows simultaneous handling of an enormous amount of samples, but the results are not quantitative and do not allow quantitative comparison in a wide dynamic range.
The principles of affinity aided solution hybridization are well known and have been disclosed, for example, in the patents U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,136,531 and 4,968,602. DNA diagnostics and detection using mass spectrometric methods have been described, for example in the patent U.S. Pat. No. 6,043,031 and the International patent application WO 99/37663.
The patent U.S. Pat. No. 5,807,682 discloses a method, which applies affinity aided solution hybridization and fractionation for detecting one or more mutation sites in the same gene. Therefore, the probes are short oligonucleotide sequences, and the hybridization temperature is critical making it difficult to use a large number of probes simultaneously, since multiple probes are prone to have different melting temperatures. One or more of these probes identifying specific mutations sites are separated and identified by selectively modifying the probes with a synthetically produced uncharged polymer, which alters the charge/fractional drag, which enables the probes to move with different mobility rates in a non-sieving medium.
None of the methods mentioned above tackle the problem of providing a method for a quantitative determination of several different polynucleotides simultaneously.
In the International patent application WO 02/055734 a method and test kit for overcoming the problem of obtaining quantitative results is described. Said patent application discloses a method and a test kit, including the reagents for quantitative determination of polynucleotides or variations in their amounts in a cell or tissue sample. The method and test kit applies organized pools of soluble polynucleotide probes with distinct, distinguishable sizes varying from 16 to several thousands of base pairs. The quantitative method allows comparative assessment of variations, e.g. in transcription profiles or expression patterns. Said method is based on the varying and distinct sizes of soluble polynucleotide probes. It is the difference in size of the probes that enables the assessment of the individual nucleic acid sequences.
Probes from more or less conserved or hypervariable regions are known to enable classification and organization of different organisms in phylogenetic levels including groups, genus, species or subspecies. A quantitative evaluation of the amounts of individual organisms, their subpopulations in a mixture using said probes would enable studies of dynamic variation in target populations. Such evaluations would have several useful applications. Unfortunately, the method disclosed in WO 02/055734 is not applicable to probes, which are polynucleotide sequences having approximately the same number of nucleotides, because sufficient resolution for reading the results may not be achieved.
Consequently, the objective of the present invention is to provide a new and effective tool to enable specialists working with or being responsible for investigations and evaluations of possible health risks and the need of repair or other remedial measures to obtain quantitative data for evaluating the risks and remedies.
The objective of the present invention is to provide a method and test kits not only for quantitative determination of the amounts and relative proportions of individual organisms, or certain subgroups in a population, it also allows comparative assessments of sequential time variations in the population due to internal or inherent control mechanism taking place in the cell or selected measures or interventions externally applied on the organisms or populations of organisms or polynucleotides thereof. Comparative assessments of population in sample obtained from different sites may also be made by this method. Simultaneously, the objective is to provide a very sensitive test, which allows the quantitative determination of very small amounts of analyte polynucleotides, which otherwise would be under the detection limit. This is achieved by PCR-amplification of the probes, which correspond to the amount of analyte polynucleotides having a sequence complementary to that of the probe in the sample. Due to the fact that the probes are present in surplus as compared to the analyte polynucleotides they may be quantitatively recovered and released before the PCR-amplification.
The advantages related to the present invention as well as to the method and test kits described in WO 02/055734, include the fact that the quality of the polynucleotide preparation, especially RNA, to be analyzed, is not critical. For example, RNA known to require special treatment, due to its instability, may be used without adding any resolution enabling tags for the quantitative assessment. The manufacturing of test kits, which need not include immobilization steps and certain commercially available reagents allows preparation of easily adaptable tailor-made tests, directing the attention to certain subsets of genes in a given organism or related organisms.
The method may be used as fully automatic or semiautomatic assemblies. The procedure may be interrupted at several stages. The samples and reaction products may be preserved until sufficient data has been collected or it is more convenient to continue the process and record the results.